The present invention relates to a system for redeeming coupons, and in particular to a self-contained personal data collector for scanning and storing product code information from coupons.
Product manufacturers use paper coupons to stimulate sales of their products by redeeming the value of the coupons against the purchase price of products. To take advantage of coupons, a purchaser must first find a coupon for a desired product in a newspaper or magazine, cut out the coupon, and carry a stack of coupons to a store for redemption. At the store, the purchaser must search through the stack of coupons to find the coupon for a desirable product and submit the coupon to a cashier who processes the coupon and handles the paper trail to the manufacturer. The process of collecting the coupons, searching in a stack of coupons to find the coupon for a particular product, and processing of the coupons by the store is quite time-consuming and inefficient.
To address these problems, scanner devices have been utilized to allow a user to scan product bar code information from coupons into the scanner device memory for storage and later downloading to a store register for redemption. Although such scanner devices allow a user to scan and store bar code information, the bar code is not processed within the scanner and the user is not provided with any feedback as to the nature of the information stored in the scanner device. Further, the user has no way of looking through the stored information to determine which coupon items have been scanned into the scanner device, or to delete unwanted items.
Existing systems utilize external peripheral devices and master processors for processing the scanned bar codes to manage the information stored in the scanner. Such systems also only address downloading raw bar codes from the scanner in order to alleviate the paper trail problem between the store and the manufacturer. It is highly desirable for a user to be able to scan coupons, receive feedback about the corresponding product, and manage the items stored in the scanner device, all by using a self-contained hand-held unit. As such, the user can carry the unit around without having to depend on external databases and peripheral devices for data processing and access to detailed product information. Existing systems do not provide a self-contained scanner unit where bar codes are scanned, decoded and processed while providing visual feedback to the user. Further, existing systems do not provide a user with the ability to interactively manage the information stored in the scanner at the user's convenience with meaningful feedback about the data stored in the scanner.
There is, therefore, a need for a self-contained personal data collector device which allows a user to scan product code information from coupons into a memory device, and receive feedback about the nature of the information stored in the memory device. There is also a need for such a device to provide a user with ability to interactively manage the list of items stored in the memory device.